Gunman Sought Board Lawyer First

When Ron Wenkart turned on the TV Monday night, a chill ran down his spine.

He saw Michael P. Generakos--a man who had blamed Wenkart and others at the Orange County Board of Education for his troubles. And he was holding a gun on Wenkart’s colleague John Nelson, pushed out a door with his hands in the air, terror on his face.

“That could have been me,” said Wenkart, an attorney for the school board. “That could have been me.”

As Wenkart watched, a police sharpshooter felled Generakos with a single bullet to the head, and Nelson ran for safety.

“I really felt sad,” Wenkart said. “I’ve been going over it in my mind . . . wondering what I could have done differently. I didn’t think it would end like this.”

To Generakos, Wenkart had been the enemy, costing him first the right to make educational decisions for his son and daughter, then helping the children’s mother get custody in late September.

When Generakos went to the school board’s headquarters Monday to take hostages, he stopped at Wenkart’s office first.

Wenkart, called away for a meeting, was not there.

“Is Ron here?” Generakos asked one of secretaries.

“No, he’s out of the office,” she said.

“Well, got to go,” Generakos said, heading down the hall.

His presence did not alarm employees at the school board’s Costa Mesa headquarters. Some of them had dealt with Generakos so often that they recognized him by his voice alone.

Minutes later Generakos, armed with what appeared to be a gun and explosives, took Nelson and administrator Lynn Hartline hostage. He told them he wanted to die but didn’t have the courage to do it himself.

Wenkart has dealt with many angry parents in his 16 years with the school board. Most of them felt that the school system was doing too little. Generakos, by contrast, believed the school was doing too much, forcing his teenage son, who was deaf and going blind, to learn Braille.

And to Generakos it was personal.

In increasingly belligerent tirades in person, on the phone and at school board meetings, Generakos blamed Wenkart and declared that the mild-mannered 47-year-old attorney was out to get him. It was Wenkart, he said, who had robbed him of his parenthood.

In early 1997, a court gave educational custody of Generakos’ two children to his former wife, largely because Generakos refused the school’s recommendation that their son, who is deaf and going blind, learn Braille.

“I’ve been demoted to bus driver, cafeteria worker and Laundromat,” Generakos told school board members in July 1997. “You’re allowing your general counsel to do this. You guys are allowing this to happen, and it’s wrong.”

In meeting after meeting, Generakos begged school board members to help him. He said he wasn’t asking for anything that Wenkart and others hadn’t done for his former wife.

Tapes of those meetings, released Wednesday by school board officials, show Generakos increasingly distraught over time, angry at board members who sat silently as he made his appeals.

One letter he sent to the school board was an eerie foreshadowing of what happened this week. School board officials, he wrote, “shot me in the back with a high-powered rifle from 300 yards away. I was on the ground before I heard the noise.”

He continued: “The county’s attorney, Ron Wenkart, looked at me in astonishment. Why would I be angry? . . . So I was not only shot in the back, but told I should thank them for having done it.”

“I had no animosity toward Mr. Generakos,” Wenkart said Wednesday. “But he thought I did.”

“He had an amazing ability not to listen, to just ignore what anyone said to him and keep on going,” Wenkart said. “It was like he had armor around him, and no matter what you said, it didn’t affect him.”

Monday afternoon, when he first learned of the hostage situation, Wenkart called his wife at their Anaheim Hills home.

“She knew in general about what had happened with Mr. Generakos” in the past, Wenkart said. “She was very upset thinking I might be there.”

When he pulled into his driveway Monday night, his family rushed out to embrace him.

“I was just glad to be home.” he said. “I was glad I wasn’t there. I kept thinking the whole thing could have been avoided. But I thought about it all Monday night, and I just don’t think we could have done anything differently. I think it was out of our control.”

Times staff writer Phil Willon contributed to this story.